Ohr Yisrael: R’ Salanter’s Innovations (7)

People who strive for excellence of one sort or another sometimes despair or
even lose hope. After all, they have their ideals of how things should be
done, they strive for that, and (being the sort of people they are) they
often succeed. But because they too have their limitations, they sometimes
fail to a degree. When that happens more than they think it should, the
light in their eyes and heart starts to dim, possibilities seem to wane, and
they become dejected. That’s all the more so true of those who strive for
spiritual excellence who have the loftiest of expectations and the most
clear-cut vision of right and wrong.

R’ Salanter recognized all that and took pains to prevent it. He encouraged
us all to indeed strive for spiritual excellence and to be idealistic, but
he adjured us to remember that losing one’s perspective could be fatal for
one’s basic spiritual well-being. So he offered the following,

We’re to know that change and achievement happens by degrees. As such, even
if we’d have failed to make a particular trait a veritable, permanent part
of our being, we’re to nevertheless know that something of that trait has
already imprinted itself onto our soul in the process. Each concentrated
effort to focus on a trait we’d like to adopt, and every attempt to focus on
a detail of it and take it to heart, embeds itself into the heart and plants
seeds (albeit slow growing seeds sometimes, the truth be known).

His further point is that in fact the effort is cumulative: each success
builds on the ones before it, and the lot of them form a firm basis for
change. And while the trait we want to assimilate may not yet have come to
fruition, its opposite which we’d want to eradicate, would more likely than
not have been undone (and so, for example, while I may not become the
charitable person I want to be, I may very well be less and less harsh when
asked for a contribution).